firewing1's blog

I came across the Yes Men's latest antics today: they have written their own New York Post fake all about climate change. The funny part is that even though the paper is a fake, the contents are completely factual. I think it's great! Check out the video below to see what people thought about the prank.

Since my update to Snow Leopard, I was pleasantly surprised to find that Apple has updated PHP to version 5.3 and also included the GD extension. While I no longer have to rebuild the extension manually like on Leopard, these changes to PHP brought around a different problem: Drupal is currently not compatible with PHP 5.3 (#360605).

I've been trying to get my local Drupal installations working, and although the patch from post #84 works pretty well (when applied to a D6 CVS checkout), Ubercart is still nonfunctional. Since I am currently building and testing Ubercart-enabled sites, my only remaining option was to downgrade to PHP 5.2.10. I wanted to have the same extensions and options that Apple's PHP 5.3 build had, so I started by viewing the output of phpinfo() and copying the configure command. To compile PHP, locally installed copies of libpng, libjpeg and pcre are required so let's started with that:

(Like in the Leopard tutorial, I assume you have installed the Xcode & related developer utilities and that all downloads are saved in the "Downloads" folder in your home). Visit the libpng, libjpeg and PCRE homepages and download the latest release available for both. As of writing, the most recent releases are libjpeg 7, libpng 1.2.39 and PCRE 7.9.

The final step is to restart Apache - this can be done by toggling Web Sharing in System Preferences, or alternatively via the apachectl command:sudo apachectl restart

That's all! Now run phpinfo() and verify that PHP 5.2.10 is up & running. While I was trying to get this working, I stumbled accross two compile errors - for the sake of completeness, I've listed them below along with the failure cause:

This error occurs if EXTRA_CFLAGS="-lresolv" is not used while compiling PHP:

Seeing as I completely reformatted my MacBook Pro's hard disk, I also had to reinstall Windows via Boot Camp 3.0 today. Everything went well, however when the time came to install Service Pack 3 (my copy of XP is an SP2 OEM disc), I received an odd error I had never seen before:

A Google revealed that this error is caused by an Apple's new HFS+ drivers for Windows, as detailed here. Simply following the instructions and renaming the driver fixes the problem. After installing SP3, I restored the HFS+ driver to it's original state and all is well.

I just installed Snow Leopard and I must say that I am very impressed. Apple has once again done an excellent job and rounded off the rough edges on Leopard, which was already a pleasure to use.

Although Apple recommends doing an upgrade install over a clean install, I opted for a clean install because I've modified various parts of my OS X Leopard installation over time (installed Python 2.6 over 2.5, installed KDE for OS X, a few MySQL installations/upgrades, etc) and I wanted to try a fresh start of OS X. Formatting the hard disk took and the installation was about half an hour from start to finish, and I was able to use my new system as soon as the Snow Leopard installer rebooted the machine for me.

One of the first things I noticed was that everything was much more snappy compared to Leopard. Everything I do seems more responsive while using Snow Leopard; all of the small lags or delays (while restoring a minimized window, for example) are gone. On the other hand, more intensive tasks like opening a large application or restarting the machine are noticeably faster. Phoronix released an article today comparing the performance of Snow Leopard (OS X 10.6) vs Leopard (OS X 10.5), and at first glance it seems like OpenGL performance has dropped a bit, but otherwise there are enhancements all around.

I was a bit worried as I was upgrading because I had read this document describing that certain (popular) software titles were incompatible and would not open on Snow Leopard. As it turns out, I had no problems at all with any of my software. All of the software I was using with OS X 10.5 works perfectly with OS X 10.6, including Thunderbird 3.0b3, MacFUSE+NTFS-3G, Starcraft and OpenOffice.org. It should be noted that for Starcraft and other PPC-based applications to work, you need to install Rosetta from the Optional Installs of the Snow Leopard installation DVD.

So if you're reading this on a Mac with OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or 10.5 (Leopard), I recommend that you grab a copy of Snow Leopard the next time you are nearby an Apple store or reseller. Snow Leopard is being sold at $35 for a single license or $55 for the family pack (5 licenses for use in one household) and the feature and performance enhancements it brings are well worth it.

For what it's worth, one of the changes I particularly like is how Snow Leopard reports disk size, which as documented here, has changed. All tools in Snow Leopard now report disk size using base 10 measurements, meaning a 200GB hard drive appears in your system as 200GB and not 186.26GB. I'm glad that somebody has finally made a move, because users - myself included - honestly don't care if a GB is 1024 or 1000 MB. That is irrelevant. What does matter is that the measurement doesn't change in one context and another. Otherwise, it isn't much of a standard measurement, right? It would be ridiculous to propose that the same unit "kilometre" represented a different distance depending on if you walked or drove from point A to B, but essentially that is what has happened in the computer industry. Depending on if you are shopping for or writing information to a storage medium, its size changes with the same unit. It's pretty odd to explain that when someone asks "where has the remaining 300MB gone on my 4GB USB key? I only see 3.7GB."